Bulls in Las Ventas: Cuadri, a resounding failure | Culture

Joy, in a well. The start of the season could not have been more disastrous. Cuadri’s prestigious iron has left a fat, black blur. Large bulls – the first, weighing 668 kilos -, most of them ugly, all of them with flabby flesh, poised, without mobility, without any hint of breed, complicated and dangerous. And all of them are meek. Tame in solemnity despite the interest on the part of the public and the bullfighters to put them away from the horses. Some went to the picador, but no one humiliated him or fought bravely on the breastplate. Some attacked, in other words, with their faces in the clouds, and others were repelled. Meek.

With half an attack on the capes, hesitant and cutting the trip in banderillas, and poised, lifeless, with manifest reluctance and terrible ideas in the final third.

A run to forget.

And with these wickers, the bullfighters could only offer disposition and courage; and also heaviness, it must be said.

Pepe Moral, for example, arrived at Las Ventas with the urgent need to succeed to look at the season with hope. He had plenty of attitude and lacked some fundamental ideas. In front of the bull it cannot be all courage and bravery; we must not forget the head. He was five seconds off the clock to hear the three warnings in his first, which would have been lethal for his immediate future. And all because he did not find the time to go in to kill, erroneously determined to try to make impossible passes against a reserved and complicated bull that did not have them. He had more than demonstrated his ability, his craft and his best intentions, but his ideas piled up and he was on the verge of ruining everything.

The best thing is that he was saved from a goring at the first blow of the afternoon. He waited for that first bull on his knees in the media to receive it with a long exchange. The animal came out of the pigsties, it was stopped, Moral got up in an attempt to avoid it, but the bull ran over it, knocked it down and trampled it in a couple of seconds that were endless. Fortunately, there was no goring or stomping, but the scare was terrible.

With four Veronicas and a half pregnant with good taste, he received the fourth, another impossible bull for bullfighting in the last third. And there his work remained.

Damián Castaño drew four other verónicas on the fifth in the afternoon, and there were no more. Some loose passes and little else. His excessive ambition allowed him to draw five natural ones, one by one, but with depth, to his first, in as ugly a style as his brothers.

And Gómez del Pilar, another brave man in the ring, to struggle, like his teammates, with an impossible lot. He insisted a thousand times without hope of any positive result. His first one was not difficult, and the sixth, very violent.

The fight lasted two and a half hours. A long time for so much disappointment, for so much meekness, for so much lack of caste of such prestigious livestock. A fat blur.